A big man with a red bandanna tied into a cap stepped into the road behind him. "You ain't the boss 'round here any more, Captain."
Cooper turned and glared. "Who the hell said I was? Why don't you get to work and do something useful?"
"Don't have to work," said the woman in red velvet. "You can't force us and you can't whip us. Not no more. We're free."
"Free to squander your lives in sloth. Free to forget your friends."
"Friends? The likes of you, who kept us locked up?" The bandanna man snickered. "Ride on, Captain, 'fore we drag you off that nag and give you the kind of hidin' we used to get."
Cooper's jaw clenched. He pulled out the pocket pistol and pointed it. The woman in velvet screamed and dived into the ditch. The others scattered, except for the bandanna man, who strode toward Cooper's horse. Suddenly, good sense prevailed; Cooper booted the nag and got out of there.
He didn't stop shaking for almost ten minutes. Trezevant was right. The legislature must do something to regularize the behavior of the freedmen. Liberty had become anarchy. And without hands to labor in the heat and damp, South Carolina would slip from critical illness to death.
Later, when he calmed down, he began to consider the work to be done at the shipping company. Fortunately, he didn't have the extra burden of worrying about Mont Royal. Decency and propriety had prompted him to make his arrangement with Orry's widow, and she now bore all the responsibility for the plantation to which he held title. Madeline was of mixed blood, and everyone knew it, because Ashton had blurted it to the world. But no one made anything of her ancestry. Nor would they so long as she behaved like a proper white woman.
Melancholy visions of his younger sisters diverted him from thoughts of work. He saw Brett, married to that Yankee, Billy Hazard, and bound for California, according to her last letter. He saw Ashton, who'd involved herself in some grotesque plot to unseat Davis's government and replace it with a crowd of hotspurs. She'd disappeared into the West, and he suspected she was dead. He couldn't summon much sorrow over it, and he didn't feel guilty. Ashton was a tormented girl, with all the personal difficulties that seemed to afflict women of great beauty and great ambition. Her morals had always been despicable.
The sun dropped down toward the sand hills behind him, and he began to wind through glinting salt marshes, close to home. How he loved South Carolina, and especially the Low Country. His son's tragic death had transformed him to a loyalist, although he still perceived himself to be a moderate on every issue but one: the inherent superiority of the white race and its fitness to govern society. Cooper was at this moment about ten minutes away from an encounter with a man who carried Southern loyalty far beyond anything he ever imagined.
His name was Desmond LaMotte. He was a great scarecrow of a man, with outlandishly long legs, which hung almost to the ground as he rode his mule through the marshes near the Cooper River. His arms were equivalently long. He had curly carrot-colored hair with a startling streak of white running back from his forehead; the war had given him that. He wore a neat imperial the color of his hair.
He came from the old Huguenot stock that dominated the state's town and plantation aristocracy. His late mother was a Huger, a Huguenot name pronounced You-gee. The war had cut down most of the young men in both families.
Des was a native Charlestonian, born in 1834. By the time he was fifteen he'd reached his adult height of six feet four inches. His hands measured ten inches from the tip of the little finger to the tip of the thumb when the fingers were spread. His feet measured thirteen inches from heel to big toe. So naturally, like any strong-willed, contrary, and defiant young man with those physical characteristics, he decided to become a dancing master.
People scoffed. But he was determined, and he made a success of it. It was an old and honorable profession, particularly in the South. Up among the hypocrites of New England, preachers always railed against mixed dancing, along with dancing in taverns, Maypole dancing (it smacked of pagan ritual), or any dancing with food and drink nearby. Southerners had a more enlightened view, because of their higher culture, their spiritual kinship with the English gentry, and their economic system; slavery gave them the leisure time for learning how to dance. Both Washington and Jefferson — great men; great Southerners, in Des's view — had been partial to dancing.
Early in life, whether riding or thrusting with a foil or idly tossing a horseshoe with some of the children of Charleston's free Negro population, Des LaMotte demonstrated an agility unusual in any boy, and remarkable in someone growing so large so quickly. His parents recognized his ability, and because they believed in the benefits of dance instruction for young gentlemen, they started his lessons at age eleven. Des never forgot the first stern words of his own dancing master. He'd committed them to memory and later used them with his own pupils:
The dancing school is not a place of amusement, but a place of education. And the end of a good education is not that you become accomplished dancers, but that you become good sons and daughters, good husbands and wives, good citizens and good Christians.
In the five years preceding the war, well and happily married to Miss Sally Sue Means, of Charleston, Des had established a school in rooms on King Street, and developed a thriving trade among the Low Country plantations, through which he made a circuit three times annually, always advertising in local papers in advance of his visit. He never lacked for pupils. He taught a little fencing to the boys, but mostly he taught dances: the traditional quadrilles and Yorks and reels, with the dancers in a set or a line that would not compromise their morals through too much physical contact. He also taught the newer, more daring importations from Europe, the waltz and polka, closed dances with the couples facing one another in what some considered a dangerous intimacy. An Episcopal divine in Charleston had preached against "the abomination of permitting a man who is neither your fiancé nor your husband to encircle you with his arms and slightly press the contour of your waist." Des laughed at that. He considered all dancing moral, because he considered himself, and every one of his pupils, the same.
The five years in which he taught from the standard text, Rambeau's Dancing Master — his worn copy was in his saddlebag this moment — were magical ones. Despite the abolitionists and the threat of war, he presided at opulent balls and plantation assemblies, watching with delight as attractive white men and women danced by candlelight from seven at night until three or four in the morning, hardly out of breath. It was all capped by the glorious winter social season in Charleston, and the grand ball of the prestigious St. Cecilia Society.
Des's knowledge of dancing was wide and eclectic. He had seen frontier plank dancing, in which two men jigged on a board between barrels until one fell off. On plantations he'd observed slave dancing, rooted in Africa, consisting of elaborate heel-and-toe steps done to the beat of clappers made of animal bone or blacksmith's rasps scraped together. Generally, the planters prohibited drums among their slaves, deeming them a means of transmitting secret messages about rebellions or arson plots.
He had dreamed long hours over an engraved portrait of Thomas D. Rice, the great white dancer who'd enthralled audiences early in the century with his blackface character Jim Crow. From Carolinians who'd traveled in the North, he'd heard descriptions of the Shaking Quakers, notorious nigger lovers whose dances gave form to religious doctrine. A single slow-moving file of dancers, each placing one careful foot ahead of the other, represented the narrow path to salvation; three or more concentric rings of dancers turning in alternate directions were the wheel-within-a-wheel, the Shaker vision of the cosmos. Des knew the whole universe of American dance, though to those who paid him he admitted to liking only those kinds of dancing that he taught.